I tried playing this on a laptop with windows 11. Thief 1 and 2 both worked without an issue, but thief 3 fails to work (can't get past tutorial, its buggy). While there maybe unofficial patches that help with this, for me this is unacceptable and not worth my time.
While graphically this game gave some issues, gamplay wise it has aged very well in 2024. Great background soundtracks. Gameplay is not that difficult but fun due to the diverse way to handle the game, level design is great. Just go for it.
Its a good 3d platformer, very creative level design. Its a prety easy game that anyone would be able to enjoy. Humor is pretty good, should make you laugh and keep things light.
Insanely illogical puzzles. Just watch on youtube for superior experience. This is the only game where I used walkthrough for almost everything, as it is simply not worth wasting your brain energy on solving them. Characters are bad, music is bad, puzzles bad. The only not bad thing is the atmosphere and store, which are above average at best.
If you watch this on youtube this would be a superior experience to playing it, which annoys me hence 2 stars. Issues are: - Slow walking animation - Entering/exiting area wastes more time in unskippable animations - Some diagrams can't be carried with you, so you would need more retractions across the level to solve puzzles (which test your patience with slow walking/entering/exiting) Its a good experience with a walkthrough.
Most of the game is fantastic, but the checkpoints really hurt the experience on higher difficulty. Back in old days developers put in fake difficulty like this since they didn't want to expose the game's short length - this game lasted me 15 hours, but the content in it is probably closer to 9 hours (maybe even less). If they made a sequel to this, I guarantee you they wouldn't use the same checkpoint system. Not only does the game NOT save the game on a checkpoint (you have to manually save every checkpoint to actually persist the changes), the checkpoints are also placed very aggravatingly. It is very common to defeat a boss and find more enemies before you hit a checkpoint, which might result in you retrying the boss multiple times - this really ruins immersion as defeating the boss doesn't feel as fun as it would be. I recommend this game if you feel you would be ok with rubbish grade save system. Do not hesistate in using wikis/guides/glitches to defeat bosses, especially on the highest difficulty. (You will need to tweak a couple of ini files to get the game to display full hd and enable sound, which I didn't mind).
Venetica is a third person action RPG. Gameplay is similar to fable series. Pros - - Flow of the game is pretty impressive. You unlock fast travel in a very organic way in this game, and even games like dark souls struggled with managing that. - Quality of life features are decent. - Game length is just right. - Some of the maps in the game remind me of games like dragon age and witcher. - Decent soundtracks. - In general I found it fun to be exploring the world of venetica, which is not always the case for me in other games. Cons - - Have to go in with low expectations, otherwise you will find many things to be of low quality. - Combat is simplistic, similar to fable. No ranged weapons like bows, guns, etc. The only variety in combat is achieved by different melee weapons, and magic skills. - Quests can be pretty repetitive (defeat "Gripper" in location A/B/C). I joined a guild where I got 4 guild missions, all of them involving killing the same enemy. The only variety in those missions were finding the enemies, which was decently fun. If there were more interesting side quests and a better combat system, then this would have been a decent recommendation.
